What Would Happen if the Earth Were Really Flat?

flat earth map

If Earth were apartment, you'd know it, because a lot of things would work differently. Photo: Pexels

By Doug Primary

Welcome to the new year, 2018. The Earth has withal again fabricated a revolution about the sun. But not and so fast. If you subscribe to the idea of a flat Globe, and then yous'd believe that no such thing happened, because the sunday rotates in a circle effectually the sky.

Humans have known for thousands of years that the planet is round, yet the belief in a flat Earth refuses to die. Members of the Apartment Globe Society and several celebrities, including Atlanta rapper B.o.B and NBA player Kyrie Irving, claim to hold such beliefs. Permit's examine, then, how the well-known principles of physics and science would piece of work (or not) on a flat Earth.

Gravity Fails

First of all, a pancaked planet might not have any gravity. Information technology'due south unclear how gravity would piece of work, or be created, in such a globe, says James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. That'southward a pretty big deal, since gravity explains a wide range of Earthly and cosmic observations. The same measurable force that causes an apple to fall from a tree too causes the moon to orbit the Earth and all the planets to orbit the sun.

People who believe in a flat Earth assume that gravity would pull direct down, but there's no testify to suggest it would piece of work that style. What we know about gravity suggests information technology would pull toward the middle of the deejay. That ways information technology would only pull direct downwardly at one signal on the center of the deejay. As you got increasingly far from the center, gravity would tug more and more than horizontally. This would have some strange impacts, similar sucking all the water toward the center of the globe, and making trees and plants grow diagonally, since they develop in the opposite direction of gravity'due south pull.

Solar Problems

Then at that place's the lord's day. In the scientifically supported model of the solar organisation, the Earth revolves around the lord's day because the latter is much more massive and has more gravity. However, the Earth doesn't autumn into the sun because it is traveling in an orbit. In other words, the sun'southward gravity isn't acting alone. The planet is also traveling in a direction perpendicular to the star's gravitational tug; if it were possible to switch off that gravity, the World would shoot away in a straight line and hightail it out of the solar system. Instead, the linear momentum and the lord's day'due south gravity combine, resulting in a circular orbit effectually the sun.

The flat Earth model places our planet at the middle of the universe, but doesn't suggest that the sunday orbits the World. Rather, the sun circles over the top side of the world like a carousel, broadcasting light and warmth downward like a desk lamp. Without the linear, perpendicular momentum that helps generate an orbit, information technology's unclear what force would keep the sun and moon hovering to a higher place the Earth, Davis says, instead of crashing into information technology.

Too, in a apartment world, satellites likely wouldn't be possible. How would they orbit a aeroplane? "There are a number of satellite missions that society depends on that just wouldn't work," Davis says. For this reason, he says, "I cannot call back of how GPS would piece of work on a flat World."

If the sun and moon just loop effectually i side of a apartment Globe, there could presumably be a procession of days and nights. But it wouldn't explain seasons, eclipses and many other phenomena. The lord's day would likewise presumably have to be smaller than Globe so as to not burn up or crash-land into our planet or the moon. However, we know the sun to exist more than than 100 times the diameter of the Earth.

Removing Heaven and Globe

Deep below footing, the solid core of the Globe generates the planet's magnetic field. But in a apartment planet, that would have to be replaced by something else. Perhaps a apartment sheet of liquid metal. That, withal, wouldn't rotate in a way that creates a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, charged particles from the sunday would fry the planet. They could strip away the atmosphere, as they did after Mars lost its magnetic field, and the air and oceans would escape into space.

Tectonic plate movement and seismicity depend on a round Earth, considering only on a sphere do all the plates fit together in a sensible way, Davis says. Movements of plates on i side of the Earth effect movements on the other. The areas of the Globe that create crust, like the mid-Atlantic ridge, are balanced by places that consume chaff, like subduction zones. On a apartment Globe, none of this could be adequately explained. There'd also have to be an explanation for what happens to plates at the border of the world. One could imagine they might fall off, but that would presumably jeopardize the proposed wall that prevents people from falling off the disk-shaped world.

map of flat earth

How some Flat Earthers map out the planet. The Chill is at the center, and an "ice wall" effectually the edges supposedly prevents people from falling off. Paradigm: Wiki Eatables

Perhaps one of the most glaring oddities is that the proposed map of the flat Earth is totally different. Information technology places the Arctic at the center while Antarctica forms an "ice wall" around the edges. In such a world, travel would look very different. Flying from Commonwealth of australia to certain parts of Antarctica would, for example, take forever—yous'd accept to travel over the Arctic and both Americas to get in that location. In addition, sure real-world feats, such as traveling across Antarctica (which has been done many times), would be impossible.

Falling Apartment

Opposite to popular conventionalities, information technology'southward a misconception that many societies of serious, educated people ever really believed in the flat Globe theory. "With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Culture from the 3rd century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was apartment," historian Jeffrey Burton Russell noted in 1997. "A circular Earth appears at least as early equally the sixth century B.C. with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere."

As the scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould one time wrote, the thought that many people—including the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus—believed the Earth to exist flat was largely concocted by 19th century writers such as Washington Irving, Jean Letronne and others. Letronne was "an academic of strong anti-religious prejudices… who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors equally believing in a apartment earth," Russell noted.

In any case, while it's fun to imagine counterfactual scenarios, scientific discipline proceeds by coming up with theories to explain observations. When it comes to these theories, the simpler, the better, Davis says. The flat Earth idea, however, clearly begins with the idea that the planet is planar, and then attempts to twist other observations to its do good. Y'all can notice odd explanations for individual phenomena nether this framework, says Davis, but "it falls apart pretty quickly."